How much of a problem is spam harvesters really? AFAIK the threat of email harvesting is greatly overexagerated on specialized forums like the org. I have a hotmail address listed so I'm getting loads of spam regardless of if it's public or not but can someone who has a non-free email service address verify if they've ever gotten spammed because their address was avalable on the org?

godix wrote:How much of a problem is spam harvesters really? AFAIK the threat of email harvesting is greatly overexagerated on specialized forums like the org. I have a hotmail address listed so I'm getting loads of spam regardless of if it's public or not but can someone who has a non-free email service address verify if they've ever gotten spammed because their address was avalable on the org?

I don't really care, though. Every piece of spam that flows in is more training data for bogofilter, which in turn helps my spam filtering on other accounts. I say bring it on: there's no real way for spammers to win against modern spam-filtering software.

tuathaanwarrior wrote:Actually, i have my email public in several places and i only get around 3-5 spam emails per week somehow and yahoo puts all of them in the junk folder.

:-( I get more spam in an hour then you get an entire week....

I think it depends on how generic your name is. before i started using the name tuathaanwarrior which is kinda obscure i had generic email addresses that would get spammed to high hell. However, since i started using this as my name, i stopped getting spam and the only idea i can come up with is that its because my name is pretty unique. I could be completely wrong but thats the best explanation ive come up with so far.

Same here. All my email addresses are prety unique, and I've never had any spam problems with my two main emails. The only spam I do get is when I give it to some site, then I just opt out of their newsletters.